"There are no Office Assistant character files present on the system" error message when you start an Office 2003 program

View products that this article applies to.

SYMPTOMS

When you start a Microsoft Office 2003 program for the second (or subsequent) time, you may receive the following error message:

There are no Office Assistant character files present on the system. Please run Setup in maintenance mode and install at least one character.

Back to the top

CAUSE

This problem may occur when all the following conditions are true:

You have Microsoft Office 2003 programs and either Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2000 programs installed on the same computer.
You start an Office 2000 or Office XP program first.
The Office Assistant is active in the Office 2000 or in the Office XP program.
You start, and then quit an Office 2003 program.
You start an Office 2003 program a second (or subsequent) time.

Back to the top

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

Back to the top

REFERENCES

For additional information, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

840644 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840644/ ) "There are no Office Assistant character files present" error message when you start an Office 2000 program for the second time

828956 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828956/ ) Running multiple versions of Microsoft Office with Office 2003

839132 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839132/ ) "There are no Office Assistant character files present" error message when you start an Office XP program

Back to the top